Chaim just can’t keep it together.
Like the panels of the ads unravel off the rusting billboards, Chaim is falling apart. And just like he tries, desperately, to keep the smiling face of a politician from revealing the toothpaste ad underneath, Chaim can’t pull himself together. Every time he hears the warning on the missile warning system: “Cachol v’lavan, Cachol v’lavan” — “blue and white, blue and white,” the warning to take cover from an incoming rocket — he loses just a little bit more of his fleeting sanity.
That’s the premise of Automation, a 10-minute entrée into the fragile mind of a lonely man whose constant battles with Kassam rockets are making his life a living hell. It’s not just the dreams, from which Chaim awakes with a start, hardly able to breathe. It’s also the hallucinations, from the peeling billboard to the transmogrifying missile to the exploding Technicolor falafel. Or the bomb shelter that is so close, yet he can never quite make it in time.
Automation is lonely, but also brilliant. Throughout the entire short, Chaim doesn’t say a word. He is expressive, for certain. He laughs. He cries. He fears — we can especially see his fear. None of which would be noteworthy were it not for one thing: Chaim is made of clay.
The irony of Automation is that it’s the cartoonishness of the film, the style that makes us think such a film should be child’s play, that makes it so strong. Director Nati Meir knows this, and he plays it to maximum effect, interspersing the clay with “live” shots. Then he adds in multi-colored animations that would make the creators of “Schoolhouse Rock” proud, not to mention the subversive images, like a billboard of an Abu Ghraib prisoner, that appear so quickly that unless you can pause it — which, given the venue in which this film is being shown, you can’t — you’ll miss it. But pay close attention to the color: The toothpaste tube, Chaim’s overalls, the almost cloudless sky, even the bomb shelter — all of it is the color of the Israeli flag, all of it the color of the missile alarm.
For 10 or 12 minutes we can suffer with Israelis, like those from the border town of Sderot, who have dealt with these rocket attacks on a daily basis, and then we can get a reprieve from the constant barrage of the blue and white. Chaim, sadly, cannot.
